page_title: Pope Manufacturing Company
section_title: Imports and the first Columbias
hierarchical_section_title: Pope Manufacturing Company / Bicycles / Imports and the first Columbias
caption_attribution_description: Fast and lightweight, the high-wheel bicycle required skill to ride and sometimes caused the rider to fall, but offered a novel form of transport. (National Museum of Natural History – Behring Center)
context_page_description: Pope Manufacturing Company was founded by Albert Augustus Pope around 1876 in Boston, Massachusetts, and incorporated in Connecticut in 1877. Manufacturing of bicycles began in 1878 in Hartford, Connecticut, at the Weed Sewing Machine Company factory. Pope manufactured bicycles, motorcycles, and automobiles. From 1905 to 1913, Pope gradually consolidated manufacturing to the Westfield Mass plant. The main offices remained in Hartford. It ceased automobile production in 1915 and ceased motorcycle production in 1918. The company subsequently underwent a variety of changes in form, name and product lines through the intervening years. Yet all the way up to present-day, bicycles continue to be made available under the Columbia brand.
context_section_description: Albert Pope started advertising imported English bicycles for sale in March 1878. His initial investment in the Pope Manufacturing Company was $3,000 (USD), or worth about $125,000 in the early 21st century. He invested about $4,000 in 1878 to import about fifty English bicycles. In May 1878, he met with George Fairfield, president of Weed Sewing Machine Company. Albert Pope was inquiring about manufacturing his own brand of bicycles, proposing a contract with Weed to build fifty bicycles at its plant in Hartford, Connecticut, on behalf of Pope Manufacturing. Pope had ridden an imported Excelsior Duplex model penny farthing to the meeting, which Fairfield inspected. At that time, sewing machines were selling poorly, so Fairfield accepted the contract.
  In September 1878, Weed Sewing Machine Company built the last of the fifty bikes under the first contract.  Albert Pope chose the brand name Columbia for the first high-wheelers "produced" by Pope Manufacturing.  These first machines, copied from the Excelsior Duplex model, were made from seventy-seven parts that were made in-house, and only the rubber tires purchased from a supplier. Pope Manufacturing sold all its bicycles from the first production run.  In 1879, production and sales were around 1,000, the last year of the Excelsior Duplex copies.
  George Herbert Day worked as a clerk at Weed Sewing Machine Company when the company started producing high-wheelers for Pope Manufacturing.  In early 1879, Day was promoted to corporate secretary.  One historian characterized Day as "Albert Pope's right-hand man in Hartford between 1878 and 1899." Albert's cousin Edward started work as the Pope Manufacturing bookkeeper in 1880.
  George Bidwell, an independent salesman from Buffalo, New York, purchased an imported Excelsior Duplex high-wheeler from Pope.  Learning in a correspondence from Pope that he would be producing his own bicycle, Bidwell started taking orders for the Columbias.  Bidwell sold seventy-five of the machines, holding down payments for each.  Pope could only deliver about twenty-five.  Shortly later, Pope hired Bidwell as Superintendent of Agencies, a job sending Bidwell on the road to teach sale agents the art of promotion. Bidwell taught agents how to promote the sport through riding halls and schools.
caption: Columbia ordinary, circa 1886 "Cliff".
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